“Bye, Roy!” I heard Katie say, faintly, from the stairs. “Thanks for everything!”

Slowly, I closed the door. The place was quiet then. I heard only the drip of my broken bathroom faucet. I expelled a long sigh of exhaustion.

Standing there alone, I had a strange inkling that I would never see Katie again. But I would see Dena. What had she meant?

I took the tape over to my VCR.

AUNT RUBY WAS RELIEVED THAT I HAD COME.

She didn’t say it, of course. Far be it from her to evince a sentimental emotion. I could feel it in the way she hugged me when I walked in the door.

It was a week later. My childhood home was filled with boxes. The place had been put on the market; there was a lot of packing and cleaning to do.

“There’s nothing to drink, except water,” Ruby said, ever the nurse. “But that’s all anybody ever really needs, anyway.”

“No, thanks. I’m fine.”

My mother wasn’t dead. The medical bills had grown so great that her house was the victim. My mother was going to stay with her sister until she could move into assisted living. She’d be a quiet guest; she still had yet to say a word.

Aunt Ruby would have held me responsible for this disaster. But when I called, I’d given her hope that I had found a remedy. And hope had, surprisingly, given her a new vulnerability.

“So, Roy,” she said, her voice quivering a little, “what’s the good word?”

“I’m not sure yet,” I answered. “But it’ll help if you give me a little … space.”

I had a small window of opportunity in which to exploit Aunt Ruby’s trust, and I used it. Nodding, obediently, she backed off. I knew she’d return to form soon—with downbeat wisdom and new demands—so I had to work fast.

I walked up the stairs, to my mother’s room.

As I climbed, I thought about the tape I’d watched in my apartment. With Dena and Katie gone, I’d wavered for a while, afraid to put it in the VCR. Then I thought: Why avoid watching Dena’s father’s secret movies of her as a kid? What was there to fear? So I popped it in.

It wasn’t footage of Dena.

It was another abandoned movie.

It starred me.

It was footage of me as a child, taken from a safe and timid distance, just as Dena’s had been. It was the truth that Ted Savitch had wanted to tell me when I showed up at his flophouse. He had lured me with Clown, knowing that I’d respond.

I reached my mother’s room. She lay in bed, surfing channels, her eyes alert, a lunch tray empty on her bedside table. I knocked, lightly, on her open door.

“Mom?”

She turned to see me. Then her face lit up. With mute excitement, she waved me over. I came forward, but only so far, stopping at the foot of her bed.

“I think I know what this is all about,” I said.

Seeing the look in my eyes, my mother immediately recoiled. Then, slowly, she began to cry, in silence. The tears seemed as much from relief as unhappiness.

Ted Savitch had met her that day at the double feature in Times Square. It was one of her secret movie outings in the city. His e-mail address had been Ted6569, the day and year I was secretly conceived. No wonder Dena and I had always been drawn to, then repelled by, each other.

“Ted Savitch was my father, right?” I said.

He was another replaced actor.

My mother didn’t respond. She just kept crying, making no noise.

“Let me guess,” I said. “He recently got in touch with you. He was in bad health, his heart was failing. He wanted to connect with you before he died. To make dying easy. I don’t know the details. But you know what I’m saying.”

The specifics didn’t matter. They had been lost in his missing diary pages. What mattered was that she’d probably felt closer to Ted in one day than she ever did to the man she married. There was a life she had never pursued, a life that linked all three of us: Mom, my real Dad, and me.

“See,” I said, “he got in touch with me, too.”

I was quiet then. I’d done all the talking, the explaining she couldn’t do in the weeks that she’d been mute.

Slowly, then, small moans began to come from her. They grew louder, breaking the embargo on discourse that had lasted until now.

She nodded. Then, at long last, she spoke. She said what she always did to me. This time, it wasn’t a way to goad or upbraid me about my life. It was a question about herself, one my mother wished desperately to have answered.

“What do you do,” she said, “with a thing like that?”

EPILOGUE

GRATEY MCBRIDE WAS LIFTING HER OSCAR AGAIN.

This time, though, it was in triumph. Now in rehab, she was being interviewed on LCM by Taylor Weinrod, before a showing of Macaroon Heart. Looking pretty and dressed presentably, she had brought her award along and held it proudly, not aggressively.

I was cruising channels, preparing the new issue of Trivial Man, which was late by weeks now. There would be no mention of The Day the Clown Cried; I couldn’t afford to blow the bargain I had made with Florent. Still, I sensed, in the admiring and resentful eyes of my little community, that word of my latest gain and loss was leaking out. It was bound to make me even more of a hero and a pariah than I already was.

How did I feel about that? I was part of a real family now, not just one made up by the trivial brotherhood. The former was profound and forever; the latter was sillier, safer, and asked much less of me. Which one did I prefer? I didn’t yet know.

It had already had a positive effect on Dena. The information seemed to free her; my half-sister had filed applications to go back to law school.

(Her houseguest, Katie, had mailed them for her. Then, on a rented bike, she had ridden away and never come back.)

I switched channels now. I stopped for a second at paid programming, which was Marthe’s successful new infomercial. Then I hit the all-news channel, which had a brief mention of Troy Kevlin’s latest indictment on drug charges. Finally, I lingered on the entertainment network, which featured news of the cancellation of Howie Romaine’s new sitcom, Romaine Land, after just three episodes. Only I knew why these changes, good and bad, had taken place.

My last stop was the local news. There was coverage of a robbery at the Queens home of a police detective, Emile Florent. The lawman himself, looking flustered and bedraggled, was giving a reluctant interview.

“Only things of personal value were taken,” he said, then turned away.

If I had been paying more attention, maybe I would have seen a crummy white Honda on the street where he and I had made our deal.

Bound to sell Clown, Stanley was on the loose again. Who knew what other treasures he would pursue? He wouldn’t be contacting Abner again, that was for sure. My old pal had curtailed his ambitions to just running his Web site, back in his parents’ house.

Then the phone rang. It was Jody. She wanted to know who played the peddler in Macaroon Heart, now unspooling on LCM. But, mostly, a little worried, she wanted to know where I’d been hiding myself.

“What have you been up to, Roy?”